GSL Wave Toolkit is a modular Unreal Engine wave material toolkit for creating animated wave motion, ripples, pulses, directional deformation, radial effects, energy patterns, stylized surfaces, and other wave-driven material effects.

Create flowing wave patterns, impact-style ripples, sci-fi energy surfaces, magical pulses, animated masks, emissive effects, abstract motion, and procedural texture deformation — without being locked to a single predefined visual style.

The Toolkit combines Ready To Use Materials and Material Instances with reusable Wave Material Functions, making it suitable both for quick production use and custom material creation.

Ready To Use

Start immediately with configurable Wave materials designed to demonstrate the core mechanics and practical composition workflows.

Included workflows cover:

• Transverse Wave — directional displacement across the direction of propagation

• Longitudinal Wave — compression and expansion along the propagation direction

• Radial Wave — center-based wave motion for ripples, pulses and circular effects

• Combined Wave — sequential composition of multiple Wave functions

• Alpha — animated transparency driven by Wave deformation

• Alpha Clip — masked and cutout-style animated Wave effects

• Emission — glowing Wave patterns for energy, magic and sci-fi materials

• Offset Addition — combine independent Wave offsets into one result

• Offset Mask — control Wave influence using a separate mask

Tiling, offset, direction, frequency, speed, amplitude, center position, colors, emission and other exposed parameters can be adjusted through Material Instances without rebuilding the material from scratch.

Build Your Own Shaders

Three reusable Wave Material Functions are included for users who want to integrate Wave behavior into their own Unreal Engine materials:

• Transverse Wave

• Longitudinal Wave

• Radial Wave

Each function works with external coordinates and exposes both CoordinatesOut and Offset, allowing the Wave logic to be reused in different ways.

Use the functions to:

• Chain Wave operations sequentially

• Combine independent offsets

• Mask Wave influence

• Modify displacement before applying it

• Integrate Wave motion into existing materials

• Combine Wave mechanics with other compatible material systems

• Build custom procedural effects beyond the included examples

The Toolkit is designed around reusable material logic rather than a collection of fixed presets, giving you control over how the Wave mechanics are used and combined.

Designed for Flexible Material Workflows

GSL Wave Toolkit can be adapted to a wide range of visual styles and material setups.

Use the same Wave system for:

ripples, animated energy, magical surfaces, holographic motion, stylized liquids, impact effects, circular pulses, moving masks, emissive patterns, abstract deformation, sci-fi materials, VFX surfaces and custom shader compositions.

The included Demo Level provides a clear visual overview of the three core Wave mechanics, Ready To Use applications and composition examples.

Unreal Engine Compatibility

Developed with Unreal Engine 5.1.1

Tested and fully functional in Unreal Engine 5.8.3

No custom C++ code or third-party plugins are required.

Part of the GSL Shader Toolkit Library

GSL Wave Toolkit is part of the expanding GSL Shader Toolkit Library — a modular collection of reusable shader tools built around individual fundamental mechanics.

Use each Toolkit independently or combine compatible mechanics to build more complex material effects.

Experiment. Combine. Create.

* Generative AI was used only for promotional artwork and listing media. The Unreal Engine materials, functions, documentation, and project content were created manually